OT: games on linux (was OT: SCO Forum)

[Steve Bergman]

Fairlight wrote:
> If you want a REAL benchmark, try The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion.  Very,
> very taxing on a system, both CPU and GPU.
>   
It's an ATI Express 200M.  Not a very heavyweight chipset, but it does 
OK.  Doom3 and Quake4 are totally unplayable.  They even give the NVidia 
6800GT on my CentOS desktop a run for its money.  But that's OK.
> BTW...under what program do you run the games?  VMWare?  WINE?  Something
> else entirely? 
>   
I only run native Linux binaries like those for:

Quake
Quake2
Quake3
Quake4
Doom
Doom2
Doom3
Wolfenstein 3D
Return to Castle Wolfenstein
Unreal
Unreal Tournament
Unreal Tournament 2003
Rune
Hexen
Hexen2
Heretic
Heretic2
Descent
Descent3
etc.

All the titles I care about have Linux versions.

I don't think that there are openserver binaries available, though.

I don't really do the Wine thing.  But transgaming has some good wine 
ports, I think.
> I'm betting SCO wouldn't recognise most of that hardware--especially the
> touchpad.  Frankly, it surprises me that -linux- recognised and used all of
> it as well.  It's come a LONG way since '93.  The amount of driver support
> is really astonishing.  The HAL has obviously gotten better as well.
>   
I'm betting it wouldn't even install.  One nice thing about Linux on 
servers is that I don't have to worry that much about the hardware.  I 
pretty much know it's going to work.  With SCO, hardware selection was 
always a bit of a gamble.
> I'm not sure I could be convinced to give up my Win2K though, if you can
> believe that.  For the desktop, I mean.  Server-wise, no contest.  But
> there'd pretty much have to be 100% game and multimedia compliance for me
> to switch my desktop.  And when last I tried xanim (SuSE 9.0 locally), it
> was dodgy even on some MPEG formats, much less some AVI encodings.

I think you would be pleased with VLC (videolan) or mplayer (with the 
win32 codecs, which are easily available and usable to get wmv9, 
quicktime support, etc.  Xanim is not in the same class.  you can try 
out VLC under Windows at http://www.videolan.org/
> Actually, I mean...you got ATI drivers...are they Linux native, or for an
> emulator?  Or both?
>   

You haven't used Linux in a while.  Both ATI and NVidia offer their own 
drivers, though the open source drivers work fine for 2D on both cards, 
and for 3D on some of the ATI cards.  The NVidia drivers are unified 
with their other supported platforms including Windows (and FreeBSD, and 
I believe, OpenSolaris) so all platforms support *all* features of the 
card.  Go to the NVidia driver download page and select Linux instead of 
Windows.

But Ubuntu has them in the Universe repository so you can just "apt-get 
install" the proprietary drivers for either ATI or NVidia with a single 
command right from the internet repository.
> (The two games you mentioned were never natively ported, to
> the best of my knowledge; I thought they stopped Quake at Quake 2, and
> Unreal was never ported, although Descent was.  If I'm wrong, do tell.)
>
>   
All Id Software games have from Wolfenstein 3D on have native ports.  
(No commander Keen, though ;-) )  All the titles since Quake1 have ports 
done by Id Software itself.  The Unreal based games were ported by Epic 
themselves, which has switched to writing things with multi-platform in 
mind.  Everything from Id through Quake II is open source, and I believe 
they are working on opensourcing QuakeIII now.  Quake III was officially 
supported by Id Software from the beginning.  You got a box, even the 
special stamped tin ones on the initial release, with a Tux sticker on 
it.  Unreal runs under the native Unreal Tournament Engine. 


LiveCD's are really popular nowadays.  Grab the Ubuntu 6.06 "Dapper 
Drake" install CD at  http://www.ubuntu.com/

It's a LiveCD.  Just boot it and try it out for yourself.  It boots into 
a fully functional Ubuntu desktop and you have an icon on the desktop to 
install to the harddrive if you desire.  It's obviously not as fast 
running off the CD, and needs more memory to run since it needs a ram 
disk and has no place to swap, but it is a good way to check it out.

I should probably try to tie this post into FilePro in some way, but it 
would probably come off as a pretty lame attempt at this point. ;-)

Take Care,
Steve